A little tea, a little chat

If you wish to fill a couple of hours of your life with a nicely written weepie, this is for you. Is it a novella? It is 140 small pages, large margins, double-spaced text. I've certainly read lots of 'short stories' this length.

It does consider a dilemma I've often wondered about. There are those quick deaths - one moment you are vacuuming or cooking dinner, next moment finito la musica. Death displaces life and you scarcely even have time to register it. There are the long ones, where you know for years what is going to happen and death simply becomes part of life, which goes on much as it had before.

Then there is finding out you have one month give or take, as the doctor says to Ambrose. I tried to make this sound better: 40,320 minutes. What do you do then? It makes me weep just thinking about it. Again. I had a friend to whom this happened. We were on the phone, we asked him to dinner, he said he couldn't for precisely that reason. He had 30 days, that was his news. There were so many things for which there was no longer time. We did see him for a coffee visit one morning during that 30 days, but in retrospect I feel terribly guilty about having taken that time from him, we just weren't important enough in his life to have justified 60 of those 40,320 minutes. Maybe, since you very devoutly believed in God despite this shitty situation, you will be reading this and if so, accept my apology, Richard.

This is Ambrose's account of those thirty days he discovered he had left. Completely different from my friend Richard's. Just as heart-breaking.